[Linganth] race and language ethnographies

[Evelyn Dean Olmsted]

A great recent work: Isar Godreau's *Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural
Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico,*U of Illinois Press,
2015.  Godreau is a cultural anthropologist but she does very sophisticated
analysis of discourse and local racial semantics in PR.

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/94dfb9zk9780252038907.html

Evelyn Dean-Olmsted

On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Roth Gordon, Jennifer F - (jenrothg) <
jenrothg at email.arizona.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I would like to start up a new list of books on race and language and,
simultaneously, send information on my own book that will be published in
late May, 2016. Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and
Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro draws on discourse analysis of the
spontaneous, slang-filled conversations of shantytown youth and
metalinguistic interview data collected from members of the middle class as
they discussed the importance of standard Portuguese. I would love to
answer questions from anyone who might be interested in using it in
undergraduate courses... Please send me a private email, and I can send you
more information. I will also happily compile a list of other suggestions
of race and language ethnographies for the ling anth blog. Here's a quick
blurb of the book:
>
> Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language
in Rio de Janeiro
>
> Based on the spontaneous conversations of shantytown youth hanging out on
the streets of their neighborhoods and interviews from the comfortable
living rooms of the middle class, Race and the Brazilian Body asks how
racial ideas about the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of
blackness continue to play out in the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro’s
residents. This book draws on over 20 years of research to explain what is
called Brazil’s “comfortable racial contradiction,” in which embedded
structural racism that very visibly privileges whiteness exists alongside a
deeply held pride in the country’s history of racial mixture and lack of
overt racial conflict. This linguistic and ethnographic account describes
how cariocas (people who live in Rio de Janeiro) carefully “read” the body
for racial signs. The amount of whiteness or blackness a body displays is
determined not only through observations of phenotypical features,
including skin color, hair texture, and facial features, but also through
careful attention paid to cultural and linguistic practices, including the
use of nonstandard speech that is commonly described as slang. It is
through adherence to implicit social norms that encourage individuals to
display whiteness (by demonstrating a “good appearance”), to avoid
blackness, and to “be cordial” (by not noticing racial differences), that
Rio residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of
Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon, who deserves to shop in privatized,
carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls, and who merits the
rights of citizenship. One’s ability to linguistically embody whiteness and
distance oneself from blackness has become critical in a context where fear
and vulnerability infuse what it now means to live in Rio de Janeiro,
enduring daily life in an urban center with notoriously high levels of
drugs, crime, and violence, where government officials and law enforcement
are unable to protect city residents.
>
> I look forward to hearing other race and language ethnography suggestions!
>
>
> jen
>
> Jennifer Roth-Gordon
> Associate Professor
> School of Anthropology
> University of Arizona
> Tucson, AZ 85721-0030
>
> jenrothg at email.arizona.edu
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--
Dra. Evelyn Dean-Olmsted
Catedrática Auxiliar, Departamento de Sociología y Antropología
Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto Río Piedras
evelyn.dean at upr.edu
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